SE, don't overthink Summoner 7.0. Just give people what they want. Just do it.

[Ggwppino]

Sort of, but I feel like this is downplaying that you had different considerations for what to do in order to fill the time between odd-minute and even-minute bursts, since the fillers were trying to set-up and engineer the conditions that you wanted to go into each peak with, and often had to dynamically-adjust to encounter conditions or timings in ways that current SMN has no real equivalents of.

At least to me, filling leading up to DWT-Contagion felt different than filling up to Bahamut; same as filling up to Bahamut felt different than filling up to Phoenix.

Considering how many fewer moving parts EW SMN's design has than previous iterations, I'm sceptical that simply having two variations of the Gem filler would add more mental overhead or complexity than all of the "moving blocks" leading up to DWT vs. Bahamut did in SB (and etc).

Exactly! It was up to the player's intelligence to make certain choices. If 3 sequential summons are introduced, this will not happen, but would remain a "push the 2 buttons and go easy".

but I personally feel that the system that EW Summoner now has is neither demanding nor complex enough for it to detrimentally affect the play experience if you're doing 6 different Gem phases vs. 3 different Gem phases per 2 minutes.

True, but nothing would change if I didn't wait another 4 years to have my main class return to having a role-playing sense and unique gameplay.

Ideally the designers would (hopefully...) adjust timings and phase-lengths as needed to prevent anything deranged from occurring — this could be as simple as leaving 1 extra GCD of filler space after "odd minutes", which just gets replaced by Alexander's Summon GCD during even minutes (as one example).

Compare for example, Samurai's Ogi Namikiri, which occupies filler slots during even-minute loops but isn't present for odd-minute loops (so other filler just gets shoved into that space, instead).

That is, of course, assuming that SE doesn't scrap the "2-minute Meta" entirely in 7.0 — in which case, it wouldn't really matter if Summoner is just doing its own thing at its own pace. (Compare, for example, Trance Rush style in ShB.)

You're right, but at this point 6 filler summons and 3 bursts would be too much, unless spam summons or a drastic reduction in summon time but remain spam summons

Well, the first thing to separate-out is that "better gameplay" is a subjective, not objective, evaluation.

I don't like the summoner's non-gameplay. The point is that it's really missing, it's not that it's "objectively" bad. it has nothing actually its own if not visual. From 30 to 86 it remains unchanged by changing the color of the spells and the powers, this, however, is objectively ridiculous.

His concept was supposed to be a caster who had to think carefully about how to use the various summons but in the end it was reduced to objective: use ifrit when the boss does nothing. Making (subjective) titan and garuda boring. This concept (failed) has removed gameplay such as the strategic positioning of the pet, weighted variation during the 2 minutes of rotation based on the needs of the fight, management of the ruin 4 stack, the management of the caster's own challenges (timers, prepositioning, movements, uptime variations), management of the dots and the various CDs.

So, starting out with, "Just give us all the Summons" is my preferred "next stopping point", because it's an easy, understandable, hard-to-misinterpret goal that SE has already created the necessary design structure to support and implement.

Had the concept actually succeeded making it equivalent to what could be done before, there wouldn't be so many people disappointed with SQE's work. Honestly, I'd rather have my main class have gameplay again than having new summons. Or rather, if the gameplay starts to be significantly influenced by the summons, then I wouldn't mind it, but this way (sequential summons to have just the summons for the sake of having them) would annoy me.


Why instead of creating gameplay for the class by adding what is missing and refining what we have, do you want to duplicate the mistake we've been carrying for these long, long, long 2 years?